Phoenix Noir

“Yes. His penis.”

“Sometimes he did. More often it was other stuff.”

I’d made her out to be just another office zombie, but now she looked up, and her eyes brimmed with concern. You never know when or where these doors will open.

“Poor thing,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Why?”

“Sweetheart—”

“My name’s Jenny.”

“Jenny, then. Adults are supposed to care for children, not take advantage of them.”

“Danny did take care of me. He brought me sundaes. He fed me, he cleaned my box twice a day. Took me out when he came home.”

Tears replaced the concern brimming in her eyes. I had the feeling that they habitually waited back there a long time; and that when they came, they pushed themselves out against her will.

She tried to cover by ducking her head to scribble notes.

Three days later, Mrs. Cabot showed up again to escort me to what everyone kept calling “a juvenile facility,” half hospital, half prison. (Daily my vocabulary was being enriched.) The buildings were uniformly ugly, all of them unrelievedly rectangular, painted dull gray and set with double-glass windows that made me think of fish tanks. I was assigned a narrow bed and lockless locker in Residence A—a closed ward, the attendant explained. Everyone started out here, she said, but if all went well, soon enough I’d be transferred to an open ward.

That was the extent of my orientation. The rest I got onto by watching and following along. Each morning at 6 we had ten minutes to shower. Then the water was turned off, though there weren’t enough showerheads to go around and even when we doubled up, some girls were left waiting. After that we had ten minutes to use toilets in open stalls before being marched in a line through a maze of covered crosswalks to the dining room. Captives from other residences, boys and girls alike, would just be finishing their breakfasts. We waited outside like ants at a picnic. Once the occupying forces were mustered on the crosswalk opposite, we entered.

School was next, three or four grades and easily twice as many ages lumped into one, with a desperate teacher surfing from desk to desk looking as though this, staying in motion, might be all that kept her from going under. Each hour or so an attendant materialized to cart a roll-call group of us away for group therapy (equal parts self-dramatization, kowtowing by inmates, and surreptitious psychological bullying by therapists), occupational therapy (same old plastic lanyards, decoupage, and ashtrays), weekly one-on-ones with the facility’s sole psychiatrist (a sad man whose hopelessly asymmetrical shoulders accepted without protest the dandruff falling like silent, secret snow upon them). Occasionally one of our troop would be led off for shock therapy, only to return with eyes glazed, mother’s milk of her synapses curdled to cheese rind, unable to recognize any of us, to recall where she was or remember to get out of bed to pee or, if she did, to locate the bathroom. One or another of us would take her by the hand and lead her, help her clean up afterwards.

I could provide little useful information about my parents or my origin. Scoop the fish from the bowl, which is the whole of what the fish knows, how can the fish possibly describe it to you? Family Services’ own searches came to naught as well. Back then few enough possibilities for tracking existed. Children’s fingerprints went unrecorded. Enforcement, legal, and support services were not so much islands as archipelagos. I’d been taken more or less at random and kept, first by Danny, then by myself, in seclusion. Four years had passed. Essentially I had no identity.

The long and short of it was, I got assigned as a ward of the court and, barring foster placement, which we all knew to be about as likely as universal health care during a Republican administration, was remanded by the court to the juvenile facility “until such time as the aforesaid attains her majority.” This majority, I found as I burrowed into outdated law books for impenetrable reasons ensconced in the facility’s woeful library, was not fixed. I could petition for it after my sixteenth birthday.

In addition, the court’s ruling decreed twice-yearly reviews by the board. For the first couple of reviews I showed up and said my piece, watching women in sober dresses and men in short-sleeve white shirts nod their heads, claiming they understood. Sure they did. As they went home to their families, Barcaloungers, TVs, chicken- and-mashed-potato dinners. I could see why it was called a board. No bending here, just sheer functionality. Nothing came of those first command performances, of course, and after that I stopped caring. Until age sixteen, when indeed I did petition the court—not the mental health, juvenile courts to which I’d been restricted the last few years, but an adult, open court. I’d spent considerable time in the facility’s library researching this, doing my best to get my ducks all in a row, even if some quackery were involved.

Mall security guard Kevin, one-time journalist Sherry Bayles, Family Services agent Mrs. Cabot, and social worker Miss Taylor were all there to testify on my behalf. Appropriately demur and deferential, I walked out emancipated. Miss Taylor set up residence for me in a halfway house. “Just until you get on your feet,” she assured me.

It was out on Ocotillo around Sixteenth and Glendale, a part of town where, whenever you emerged blinking into sunlight, homeowners on adjacent porches and in neighboring fenced yards stared at you as though you might be a cabbage that had somehow managed to uproot itself and learn to walk. (God knows how the property came to this purpose and at what cost. Some Old Money donation, possibly trying to me-morialize an addicted wife or child?) I always smiled my biggest smile, said good morning with eyes steady on these neighbors, and inquired how they were doing on this fine day. By the third week they were calling me over to ask how it was going.

Not spectacularly well, as it happened. Once prospective employers heard I was sixteen, had spent four years in a state facility, and had never before worked, the interview was pretty much over. Never mind court papers certifying me as an adult, or my own composure and comportment at these interviews. Two months in, I began having the terrible feeling that halfway might be as far as I was going to get. I mentioned this when I stopped to chat with old Miss Garrett at the end of the block. She was out in her garden weeding flowers as usual. How those weeds managed to regrow overnight, every night, I never understood. But there she was each morning in ancient pink pedal-pushers and sky-blue straw hat, pulling those suckers up with her own rootlike, arthritic hands.

“If you don’t mind swing shifts and long hours, honey, I’ve got a nephew with his own business who’s looking for a waitress. Figure you can handle pushy men?”

Cheryl was everything I expected, a plain girl like myself, quiet and superficially ingratiating, with still eyes that reminded me of my friend Bishop from back in the halfway house, or of walls spackled with unreadable graffiti.

Collins took me in and introduced me, then discreetly withdrew.

What can I say? I told her how I had come to pass the middle years of my admittedly short life. I talked about not carrying forward regrets, about simply getting on with things. Halfway through, it occurred to me that what I was saying sounded not at all different from the harangues that hundreds of teenagers suffer daily from parents. We all think we’re special, somehow exempt. When the real lesson’s how much alike we all are.

I told her I’d check back with her later, that she shouldn’t hesitate to call me if she needed to talk, anytime, day or night. Wrote my name and number on the back of a deposit slip, the only piece of paper I could find in my purse.

“Miss Rowan?”

To that point Cheryl had given no indication she was listening, not the least register of recognition, as I spoke.

“Yes?”

“Where are they going to take me next?”

For her, I well knew, the world seemed at this point little more than a congress of theys, dozens of theys shoving her about like a pawn on the board, forever testing her survival skills. Pawns were things one sacrificed, things that were captured and went away.

“Some kind of holding center would be my guess. You’re overage for the state juvenile facility. They’ll probably try for a shelter of some sort. Depends on what’s available. I’ll call in later, find out where you are. Maybe we can talk then.”

She nodded. For a moment, before they became still again, things struggled to surface in her eyes.

That night after dinner with Collins, upon which he insisted, I came home, poured a final glass of wine, and drank it standing at the front window, looking out at my neighbors’ shrouded, brightly lit houses.